Project 365+1: Days 272 - 278

It's been a bit of an up and down week, what with Bell. It's also been a very busy week (for much the same reason) so I've been glad of a long weekend to relax and get over things (as well as a chance to get properly stuck into my OU stuff).

Day 272: Tuck Shop

Saturday, after work, I went home, got dressed up in a school uniform-ish outfit and went to the school campus here (not the same school I went to when I was younger, but for some of the people I work with, it's not been all that long since they were there themselves).

It wasn't until I came to actually pick a photo for my day's photo that I realised that they all contained people from work dressed up as school children and that they might not be too keen on me sharing them on here. With a careful bit of cropping, this one will do the job. It's hardly a brilliant photo, but this is the tuck shop that was put together for nibbles, carefully edited out of the top of the photo is my boss (that version is for our Facebook group ;-)).

Day 273: The Lost World

The Lost World & Other Stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has been my book of the week this week. It's taken me a little while to get through it because I've been trying to get into a routine with my OU as well as still getting to grips with the new shift schedule at work. On the whole I enjoyed it, I'm in the process of writing a review for it just now, so I'll get all of my thoughts on here just as soon as I've finished getting caught up with all my reviews.

Day 274: Stuffed Marrow

My father-in-law has grown marrows in his garden this year and so I begged and begged and begged that we might have stuffed marrow. I can't remember the last time I had it, though I have a very clear memory of being about seven or eight and tucking into it. Mr Click did a great job, and the marrow was fabulous. Unfortunately we've eaten the last of the marrows now, but I've already requested at least three for next year.

Day 275: School Ties

I went to two secondary schools and I've held on to both of my school ties, for some random reason, just in case I need to dress up as a school girl for a disco again I suppose. Technically I could have had three ties because the stripey one was from my old school and the one with the shield on it was my senior tie from my school in Scotland. The senior school here has both a junior and senior tie, when I moved here it made sense to just wear the senior tie otherwise I would've had to get a new one after a year anyway, but now I kind of wish I'd got that one as well, it would've completed the set somehow.

Day 276: Safe At Home

This was the little nest we made up for Bell when we got her home. There was a box with blankets inside and outside and a heating pad under the table. It was all nice and cosy for her and she seemed very comfortable. I'm glad that we had her here with us in the end.

Day 277: Ducks

The above picture is a gift from a family friend as a sort of house-warming gift. They came up to visit and take my in-laws out for an early anniversary meal (to the same restaurant that we're now planning to visit for our anniversary because they gave it a very good review). This was made by our friend and we've already got one of her pictures that she made for us for our wedding. We've just got to find the right place in the house to put it (or maybe take down another picture we've got hanging up and swap it for this one for a change in scenery for a while).

Day 278: Leftovers

We try to order Chinese as a treat roughly every other month. This normally works out pretty well, it's a Valentine treat, my birthday treat, a celebration of our courses finishing/exams, and then to celebrate the start of the next course and then again for Mr Click's birthday. Not having it too often means that it's a proper treat, but at the same time, you know you're going to be having it fairly regularly.

Generally speaking, we order a little bit extra, so we can have leftovers the next day. It means that we can have a bit more choice, because the portions are so large that we can never manage it all in one go and it'd be a bit boring just to have two things (plus, I used to be vegetarian and it meant that otherwise Mr Click would have to have lots of veggie stuff rather than things that he liked).

And, now I'm going to go and sort out the photos that I took during our walk yesterday. There are so many lovely ones that I'm going to give myself a week to decide which one will be the photo for Day two-hundred-and-seventy-nine.

Sleep Tight Bell

My beautiful Bell rat slipped away in the night. :-(

She made it through the op and they got the lump. She took a white to come round from the anaesthetic so we visited her at about 5:30pm, then left her there until about nine. By then she had perked up and was doing her best to move around the box so we brought her home and settled her into our hospital cage.

She settled down and went to sleep, warm and safe, at home.

From the moment I saw Bell I knew she was going to be mine, we'd only planned on bringing home two rats and she was so pretty that I knew she would be one of the two (of course up popped another rat, and another, and we just couldn't leave anyone behind).



She was my BabyBell, my Beautiful Bell, my Silver Bell. She had a love heart between her shoulder blades and the fur there was velvet soft. When you rubbed her head or behind her ears she would brux and boggle like a mad thing. She'd always wash Carol's chin and neck if she thought Carol was being a bit lax.

The day we brought them all home we saw a lovely rainbow; driving Bell to my in-laws' to bury her we saw a hint of one in the sky.

She was one of a set and I've got a little rat-shaped hole in my heart right now, but she's at peace and that big lump has gone.

Good Thoughts Needed

My little study buddy, Bell, developed a lump a little over a month ago. We took her to the vet who said she was a bit fat and that due to the risk of the anaesthetic we should see whether it got any worse and try to slim her down a little bit.

Well, a month on and it's much bigger, so back to the vet we went today. The choice is really just to see if she can handle the surgery, or let nature take its course. We'd talked about it a lot before we took her in and decided to go for the op because at the rate that the lump has been growing, if we had her put to sleep when it started seriously affecting her mobility, I think we'd only have another two weeks with her and I'd hate for her to be suffering during that time.

She's only ten months old and is still just as keen on her food, climbs and burrows and snuggles with her sisters. She's my beautiful Bell-rat who snuffles and chatters and gives me kisses when I'm giving her cuddles. For a while if you searched for 'cute rat pics' on Google images, her picture was one of the top results.

So if you could spare a little thought for Bell tomorrow, I'd appreciate it. I know I'm going to be on edge all day tomorrow waiting to find out how she gets on. At least we'll know that we really tried everything for her and I desperately hope that we get to bring her home for more snuggles.

Project 365+1: Days 231 - 244

I've been a very bad blogger this last couple of weeks. Things have been a bit busy here the last couple of weeks and I'm just about caught up now. I can't actually remember why I didn't get around to posting last week, apparently by the time I was finished doing whatever it was I was doing instead of blogging, it was time to go home.

The good news is, I'm all caught up now. I'll apologise for the boring photos I've been taking this week. The weather's not been particularly nice up here (as you'll see below) so I've been avoiding taking my DSLR out, this kind of led to it getting put safely away so I didn't use it at all. Quite a few of these pictures are taken by iPhone (or of iPhones) because I've been a bit lazy.

Day 231: Moo Cow

We've got a bunch of cows on the estate now. My favourite farmyard beastie is probably the sheep, but cows are pretty cool too. The walk to the front gate now passes two fields of cows which are really interested in Tara and so usually walk over to the fence or gate to say hello. Tara's pretty interested in them too.

This little guy came right up to the gate while Mr Click and I were walking Tara one evening. I was kind of hoping to rub his nose, but he wasn't keen on me getting too close. He was also a little bit shy and so it was tricky to get a good photo of him. His friend was a little more photogenic, but iPhones don't photograph pure black cows very well.

Day 232: Wallpapered

Uh, yeah, as I said, lots of photos of iPhones this week. I updated my wallpaper on my iPhone to make Mr Click's graduation picture into my wallpaper and screensaver. One of the funniest things about this is that when I open my 'Social Networking' folder the top of his head seems to open (because the picture divides in two) and Twitter seems to pop out the top of his head, hehe. Apparently I'm easily amused.

Day 233: Rainbow

We've been seeing plenty of these recently, lots and lots of rainbows. Some days the weather has been so changeable it's been hard to decide what to wear out the front door. We've left the house to brilliant sunshine, so warm that you don't need a coat; by the afternoon the wind's gotten up and it's very blowy, and I've been glad to be shut in at work where it's warm and dry; then by the evening it'll be hammering down, usually just in time to make sure we get throroughly drenched during Tara's bedtime walk.

On the plus side, there's lots of pretty rainbows. This one was just the tiniest little smudge of a rainbow, it looked as though it was coming out of one cloud and going into another. As we were driving along Mr Click offered to stop so I could get a photo, I'd told him not to bother, before we came around a corner and I saw this and I decided that actually, I would take a snap of it. It's just a shame I didn't have my fancy camera with me at the time.

Day 234: Birthday Girl

Tara recently turned a year old, so I decided that we needed to have a little photoshoot. I had planned to make a little party hat to stick on her head while she had her picture taken, but I ran out of time to make one, so I grabbed a scarf instead. It was all flowery and festive looking anyway. I tied it in a big bow which Tara was most put out about.

You can practically see the embarrassment in her eyes there, she's thinking 'this picture is going to end up on the internet, isn't it?' Still, I think it's cute. Tara's probably just glad that she only has one birthday a year... just wait until Christmas!

Day 235: Nice and New

Mr Click's new phone showed up, which he was very pleased about, understandably. I was going to take a quick snap of them side by side but there was a bunch of junk of the table and I couldn't be bothered to clear it all away to make room. So here's a very quick picture of his phone in the case he ordered for it and has subsequently changed for a flippy style case that covers the front of the phone as well.

We've been very happy with Vodafone's service. It would have been all set up and ready to go the day after it was received (as he was keeping his number and had to wait for the micro sim to arrive) except we were a little bit too slow to get it set up and their phone line closed at 8pm. They've been really good about getting everything all sorted (though I still have to call up to get their parental control lock thing taken off my phone). Funnily enough I've tended to avoid Vodafone in the past, having been happy with O2 and (later) Tesco Mobile, but they've been so good with getting these phones that they've definitely made a loyal Vodafone customer out of me.

Day 236: Nosy Dog

I'd been trying to get a photo of Tara and one of the ratties nose to nose, but the ratties in question we're so keen on getting their photos taken so always ended up just out of frame (or just out of focus). The rats and the dog are very good with each other. The rats don't generally try to nip at Tara and Tara tends to just lie down and watch what's going on, occasionally sticking her nose up against the cage. Sometimes she woofs at them if she doesn't think they're doing anything interesting, or nudges the cage if she's thinking they should get up.

Sadly we discovered a lump on one of our rats, little (or not so little) Bell. She's had a squishy bit in a little roll of skin by her front left arm but it suddenly became very noticeable. Of course, that happened over the bank holiday weekend, my pets never get ill at convenient times. Bell didn't seem to notice it at all, she was still eating fine, climbing fine, moving fine, so we held off. First chance after the bank holiday we headed to the vet with Bell (and Carol as a travel companion, because she loves to travel and acts as a calming influence on the other three in stressful situations).

Bell got a relatively clean bill of health. The vet declared the lump somewhat squishy and that it was still moving around. She was still healthy, if a little over weight. Carol was declared to be healthy. Right now we're just watching it to see if it gets any bigger or if it starts bothering her. The ratties are also on a bit of a diet because Holly is very fat, Bell is fatty, Carol's not exactly slim and Ivy is about right. They really like breakfast cereal so we've cut back on that and are reducing their treats. They're not exactly impressed with this.

Day 237: A Game of Thrones

This was one of those 'Oops, I'm in bed reading and I've forgotten to take a picture today'. I couldn't be bothered to get up and find something to snap and grabbed a quick photo of my view at that particular moment. I maybe should have turned to a different page before taking the photo; Daenarys in labour doesn't make the prettiest of photos. Also, the lamp didn't provide much light so it's a little bit noisy. That'll teach me.

Day 238: We're Watching You

This is what I meant earlier when I said that the cows came over to the fence to watch us. These cows actually started out virtually at the other end of the field but one by one they followed us along the fence as Tara and I walked past. We stopped so I could take a photo and as we carried on they walked right up to the very far corner of the field and watched us go. Tara kept on pulling back to see them. She's always so excited when we go past this field, I've got to take my camera when the weather is dry so I can get a photo of her reaction to the cows.

Day 239: The Rain, Rain, Rain...

... came down, down, down!

As I may have mentioned before, it's been chucking it down more often than not the last few weeks. This is as close as I could get to a rainy day picture, that's just outside the back lobby, under the porch (so my camera stayed dry). The rain was pouring off the roof, out the gutters; look at those splashes!

There was one day in particular where it didn't stop raining all day, except when we took Tara for walk, then it HAMMERED it down! Without fail, when we left the house it would start raining, getting steadily heavier as we went along. By the time we got home it would be just starting to dry off, as though it was doing it on purpose. Still, there's something about being out in heavy rain that makes hot chocolate taste so much nicer when you get home and dry.

Day 240: Seven Lovely Men

I've been running low on clothes... well, I will when I have a clearout to donate some of the clothes I don't wear any more to charity. Mr Click made a good find during the week though, as you can see above, from one of our local charity shops. It's Dopey from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, all sparkly and sequined with the words 'Seven Lovely Men' on it.

It's my kind of colour and just the right length for the style I like. I like tops that don't ride up at the back and this comes right down to cover my bum, which is great. Mr Click also ordered me a bunch of new socks this week as well, which arrived just the very next day. They're all stripey and funky looking; all the same length and perfect for mixing and matching.

Day 241: Morse Code

A couple of years ago I bought the complete set of Colin Dexter's Morse books for Mr Click, he's finally started reading them this year, so of course I've had to read them too. I'll write a proper review for it at some point, but I'll just say here, it's been interesting reading a police/crime book set back in the seventies, seeing how things are different.

Speaking of books, I took part in a reading challenge this summer on HTV. We all enjoyed it so much that we've gone for a year long one this time around. I can't wait, it only started yesterday and I went to bed early (partly to miss all the Doctor Who chatter online) mostly with the intention of reading. I'm on the second Game of Thrones book just now: A Clash of Kings and I'm really enjoying it.

Day 242: Shower time

This is Tara lying on the bathroom floor, probably wondering why I wanted to take a photo of her lying on the bathroom floor. She normally comes up with us when we have a showers after taking her on her last walk. By that time she's usually pretty tired and ready for bed so she just flops wherever she stops. Unfortunately the floor is wooden and she goes down with quite a bang. It's just lucky that we don't live in a flat what with Thunderpaws thumping around everywhere, hehe.

Day 243: Cuddles

We were up and ready to go quite early on Friday because some men came round to put up our washing line. There was lots of drilling and banging going on at the back of the house and Tara was a little bit unsettled by it, so she climbed up onto the sofa with Mr Click for some reassurance.

Of course, when we got her we, and my in-laws, had some rules about dogs on the furniture. Naturally, all these went out the window when we she settled herself in. Now she invites herself up onto the bed in the middle of the night, happily settles on the sofa for a cuddle while we're watching TV and generally breaks all the doggy rules that we'd made up. But when you've got a sleepy, snuggly labrador on your tummy snoring away while she's dreaming, the rules seem kind of silly.

Day 244: Lap Dog

And to end this rather epic photopost (seriously, I was going to do half now and half later in the week but I couldn't decide where the best place to split the post would be so I just kept going, I'm very sorry), here's yet another cute picture of my dog pretending she's really the size of a Yorkshire Terrier.

I love how the fact that she's leaning forward in this picture makes her look much bigger - this is how big she feels when she's on your lap, even though she curls up quite small. Until I got my camera out she was all curled up fast asleep looking cute - Mr Click did not really appreciate her waking up and fidgeting when I startly clicking away. Oops.

Next week I will try to take some more interesting photos, maybe one or two actually outside if the weather improves. I'm also hoping to get lots of reading done to give me a good head start at the reading challenge, might even get some book reviews written and posted as well, so look out for those.

A Rude Awakening

The usual Project 365+1 picture post has been delayed due to an unexpected visitor in our bedroom last night. It'll be posted as normal tomorrow (I'm writing it ahead of time now that I've solved the problem with the scheduled posts), in the meantime I'll share a little story about our rats.

I've never really written a post about the girls. They've cropped up in my photo posts and I've been planning a post about them for ages, but never gotten around to writing it.

When we got them, we never really intended to come away with four girlie rats. We'd wanted some company for Mikey and planned to get a couple of little boys who could live next door and come out for cuddles at the same time. We considered the possibility of getting three, if there were three needing a new home. So when we saw three snuggled up together, we knew it was meant to be. Until a fourth little baby rat popped up. By that point we'd fallen in love with the three and couldn't pick just two out of four. So they all came home.

I'm so glad we got them when we did, we lost Mikey a couple of weeks later and they filled the hole that he left. My first rats were girls, but I don't think they were ever anywhere near as crazy as these girls are now. Right from the start they've had really distinctive little personalities.

Holly

We've got Holly, she's our little fatty. She's white with a little orangey-tan coloured head but without a stripe extending down her back. She's got pink eyes and can be quite nervous of loud noises. She loves her food. She's inclined to nip through the bars occasionally and likes going up/down your top, but doesn't understand that it's not acceptable to dig skin out of the way when you get to an obstruction, like an armpit! Considering her size, she's very agile and likes getting up onto the back of the sofa and snuggling up in the hammock at the top of the cage.

Ivy

Ivy looks very similar to Holly and when viewing them both front on (i.e. when they're just a little head peaking out of a tunnel) it can be tricky to tell them apart. Ivy is much skinnier than Holly, in fact, since Bell has bulked out a bit, Ivy's probably the smallest of the four now. She's got a tan head but she also has a little broken stripe down her back. Her eyes are pinker than Holly's and she's even more nervy of loud noises. She also hates the flash on my camera which means I don't have many photos of her because I hate to stress her out. She's a proper shoulder rat though, of the four, she favours the shoulder most and will happily sit up there when we get her out. The slight downside is that she usually gets tangled in my hair and needs help getting out.

Bell

Bell is the pretty rat. I feel mean singling out one rat over the others for being pretty, but everyone who sees Bell's marking comments on how pretty she is. She's white with a grey stripe down her back which forks at her head (it's also got a slight hint of brown in it as well). She used to be our tiny rat but a recent growth spurt has taken her into third place and she was also, like our old Mikey, a mousey rat; she looked more like a little mouse than a rat. Her face has filled out now and she'd adopted a grown up ratty walk now. She doesn't nip fingers through the bars (though she might give them a taste, just to check) and she likes to climb up your shirt and give you kisses (or lick your lips if she thinks you've been eating something nice and should share).

Carol

And lastly, there's Carol... Carol... Carol... Carol. What can I say about this little girl. She's white all over with a little patch of grey just in front of her ear (which you can kind of see in the picture above). She's always been the most forward of the girls. Right from the first day we had them, she mastered the art of jumping in and out of the cage. She likes to have her nose rubbed through the bars of the cage and she has amazing strength in her little legs - she's able to hang upside down and travel from one side of the cage to the other. She normally appears half asleep in the hammock, just a little white ball of fluff; she's the last to the food bowl in the morning because she's always so sleepy. She seems to think that she's a little person, right down to the way she stands upright on her back legs and watches the world going by. She's not quite like the others, though it's hard to say exactly why, she just isn't quite as 'rattie' as they are.

In the early hours of this morning our little Carol provided us with a rather rude awakening. I was woken at around 3:20am by Mr. Click anouncing "There's a rat in the bed!" The covers were thrown back and by the time I'd pulled myself upright (mumbling "what?!" and "is this a dream?") he'd switched the light on.

He then announced that it was Carol and that the cage was open. The whole thing felt very surreal and I was convinced I was dreaming. I frequently have very vivid dreams which feature our girls so I decided that this was clearly not real and all I needed to do was wake up. In the following hour I must have told Mr. Click that I didn't like this dream and that I wanted to wake up about a dozen times!

When I heard that the cage door was open I immediately panicked, with good reason. Bell was the only one with the sense to stay home. Carol had managed to get into bed with us, pretty amazing considering the fact that their cage is in a little alcove in the hallway between the bedroom and living room and to get onto Mr. Click's chest she'd had to scale the duvet where it hangs onto the floor. When he woke she'd been on his chest, but I suspect that she may have run down the bed because I vaguely remember the sensation of something moving alongside my back, presumably before she woke Mr. Click up.

Carol was rather unceremoniously dumped back in the cage and once Bell was located (and Mr. Click had searched inside the cage for Holly and Ivy) the door was shut. He looked behind the cage, no sign of the girls. We both set about searching, calling their names and (in my case) crawling along the living room carpet looking under the sofa, behind bags and units. I checked the kitchen and had moved on to the bedroom when Mr. Click called that he'd found them.

Now we are very lucky in that as far as we're aware, there are no holes or boards they could have gotten under. It's highly unlikely they would have been able to leave the house and my main worry was that they would be under the bedroom furniture, which would be awkward to move without injuring them.

It turned out that they were in fact in the first place we'd looked. Hiding down the back of the cage. They point blank refused to come out, in the end it took some maneuvering of the cage before Mr. Click could grab Holly and I could grab Ivy and after a quick once over we popped them back into the cage. I should note here that crawling around on the floor and grabbing terrified rats before 4am when you've got stitches in your tummy is a little bit uncomfortable. Of course, at the time I felt nothing because I was panicking about my ratlets, by the time I got back to bed, I was really feeling it!

We sat and watched to make sure that no one was too traumatised by the events. Gave them a bit of cracker each and decided that obviously, when the cage was closed up it hadn't latched properly and so when one of the girls had climbed up the bars it had fallen open. When the door is open, it's an invitation to come out as far as they're concerned. As we watched Carol decided to show us her latest party trick, and it's a pretty good thing she picked then to do it because otherwise we might have had to go through the same routine at 6am!

Carol's latest trick involves climbing onto the front door of the cage (her prime position for begging to come out; she knows if she chews on the bars there for long enough I'll freak out about her teeth and get them out for cuddles). Now what she does is sticks her nose through the bars at a particular spot, and wiggles, and chews, and wiggles a bit more. And the then cage door pops open with her on it and she's able to waddle off to ratty freedom... or our bed... whichever.

We closed the cage up and she did it again. Not just a fluke. Not a problem with the door. It was perfectly secure, it's just that the rat has figured out what to do to open it!

I tried hooking one of the shower curtain rings onto the door, normally use them for hanging things in their cage as they're plastic and fairly durable against rattie teeth. No use, she once again demonstrated her little trick. By this point I was having visions of one of us having to sit up next to the cage all night making sure that she didn't keep popping the door open.

Then I hit on the idea of using a ring from a key ring. It worked to a point. We got back into bed. Lay there nervously waiting to hear if the door popped open again. Five minutes, ten minutes, nothing. I began to think about dozing off, by this time it was after all getting on for 4:30am - a full hour after the initial visit from Carol. And then, DING cage door opened again.

This time I got out and we fastened up the door with cable-ties, put a heavy transporting case on top and went back to bed. It was not a good night's sleep. We both kept dreaming that the rats were out. This morning I was kind of surprised to see them all curled up in the hammock, fast asleep. I counted them about three or four times. We managed to make it through the night with four rats!

Once I'd gotten over the shock I cable-tied up the back door and as soon as I got online I asked around and it was suggested that we use some metal clips and maybe modify the door clip slightly to foil any further plans Carol has for late night escapades.

One thing that I can't help but think of is the fact that Carol, the sleepiest rat in the world, when faced with freedom ended up going to bed. I just hope if she does it again, she doesn't encourage her sisters to go exploring with her. Finding one rat in your bed is quite enough excitement for one lifetime, thank you very much!

Carol, several weeks ago, plotting her breakout while waiting for a cage clean

Project 365+1 Days 43 - 49

Yep, photo project is still going strong. I'm quite impressed at how I'm doing so far actually. I think the last time I seriously tried doing it a couple of years ago, I ran out of steam around March. I've kind of hit that point now where I know I need to be taking a photo at some point during the day and in the morning I start planning what it might be of, even if I know I won't be taking it until later.

Accord to the 365 Project site, I'm now 13% of the way through the project. Which is pretty good going, if you ask me.

And on to this week's photos. I'll start off by making everyone jealous of the spectacular scenery where I live:

Day 43: Night Rolls In

Last Sunday there was a fantastic sunset, we watched the sky changing colour outside my in-laws' windows and I decided that I'd have to stick my shoes on and nip outside to get a quick photo. The clouds slowly drew across the sky and it went through a range of purple, orange, pink and blue. Kind of reminded me of one of the pieces in Fantasia.

The following day, as I said in my previous post, I was off for a hospital appointment and some shopping. We do a big food shop once a month, before we go we take stock of what we've got left, make a list of what we want to have that coming month, then make a list and work out roughly what it'll come to. And only then do we actually go to the shops and buy the stuff.

Considering the last time we'd been shopping was before Christmas, our cupboards were getting pretty bare. So it was very nice when we got home from our long shopping trip, unloaded the car and made them look like this:

Day 44: Stocked Shelves

It's amazing how much food we can actually squeeze into our kitchen. Everything that we bought should keep us going for another month or so. Mr. Click always does a really good job of rustling something together on an evening for our tea, and he didn't disappoint on Valentine's Day (not that we'd actually planned anything).

I had intended to take a photo of our Valentine's Day meal, but it was late, and I was starving, and it just smelled so damn good, that by the time I remembered, it kind of looked like this:

Day 45: Empty Plates

Moments before this photo was taken, there were two plates full of Chinese stirfry with noodles, mushrooms, bamboo shoots, bean sprouts and water chestnuts. It was very tasty.

This week I also spent a lot of time working on my assignment. My reward, I had told myself, would be to install The Sims 3 on my laptop and play it once I finished. After a week of doodling house designs that I wanted to make on bits of paper (instead of actually getting on with the things I should have been doing), my assignment was more or less complete and I went to dig out The Sims 3.

Except it was nowhere to be found. It looks as though, in the process of moving house, it got left behind. After searching the cupboard with all the computer and games console stuff; the last couple of boxes which we're still in the process of unpacking and organising; the cupboard and boxes which we knew it wasn't in but checked anyway just in case; we were forced to admit that perhaps we didn't have it any more.

So Mr. Click ordered me a replacement copy, which arrived on Wednesday. Of course by the time it arrived I was busy with other things and didn't have time to get it set up on my computer (until Friday, when I wasted several hours creating a little mini-version of myself and Mr. Click). But I took a photo of it, celebrate its arrival.

Day 46: A New Game

It's been an age since I last played The Sims and I swear this edition of the game is slightly different to the one I had when it first came out. There are some features that I either had turned off before, or which were never there to start with. I spent a good chunk of the day yesterday playing with it, making my sims have loads of children (and trying to cure the resulting nervous breakdowns). At some point I'll put the World Advntures expansion pack on too, then everyone can have a holiday. I have far too much love for this game.

It's been a bit of a week for new things really. New clothes for Mr. Click, new foods for the cupboard, new game for me and then a big treat on Thursday; the new washing machine... or Bertie the Beko as my Mum-in-Law has christened it.

Day 47: Bertie

Bertie is a 6kg, A+ standard washing machine and I was so thrilled to get it all set up. As I said before, we'd been putting off getting it for months and months, it's so nice just to be able to toss all our laundry in and have spun well when we get it out, so all we need to do is hang it up. I'm sure Mr. Click appreciates not having to wring stuff out any more (and we can wash our jeans at home now). A definite improvement.

We did have to find a new home for all of our lemonade as well as the rat litter and food that formerly occupied the space where Bertie now lives. Luckily Mr. Click took better care of it than I did. My solution was to stick the lemonade on top of the counter (neither safe nor attractive). But Bertie is slim enough for there to be room down the side for the two airers we use for drying stuff indoors.

Of course, if you're going to have a washing machine, you're also going to need a laundry basket. Mr. Click picked ours up earlier in the week and I'd shoved it in the cupboard upstairs. When he reorganised the lemonade, it made space just above the washing machine, alongside the washing powder, so now we've got a little laundry station in our back room. It makes me feel so grown up to be getting excited about things like this, hehe.

Day 48: Lots of Laundry

And there's the results of our first two loads in the machine. My Father-in-Law had his knee replacement surgery yesterday, so we've temporarily (rats and all) moved in with my Mum-in-Law, so we took the soggy washing with us (many because it saved on packing clean clothes, into a bag, everything we might want to wear is in this basket... plus some tea towels).

Father-in-Law's surgey went well and although he's in pain, he's come through it well. We're just waiting to find out how his physiotherapy goes today and hopefully by tomorrow we'll have an idea of when he'll be coming out.

As I said, we brought the rats with us and I spent a good part of yesterday playing on The Sims, so I wasn't sure what I'd select as my photo for the day. Sometimes it's the days when you don't know what you'll use that turn out the best, and I have fallen in love with yesterday's photo.

Our bizarre little girlie!rats normally all snuggle up together in their little hammock, but for some reason, since we've brought them here, they've started curling up in the (empty) litter tray together. The best I can think of is that they're getting warmer than usual all in the hammock and so are retreating to another spot to cool down. Whatever the reason, when I went through to our room to pick up my camera to post the photo of the practically tropical temperatures last Monday, I saw two sleepy little rats curled in the hammock and decided to go for it as my photo of the day.

Unfortunately, the moment I turned the camera on, the little darlings woke up and started clambering all over. And the camera kept on focusing on the bars, rather than the rats (or covering the rats with blurry stripes from the bars). So I opened the cage, stuck the camera in and rattled off about ten shots in quick succession, not able to see how they would look.

There were some awful pictures, but there were a couple that weren't too bad. And this has to be my new favourite:

Day 49: Peek-a-Bell

That's my cute little Bell rat. She's becoming quite the camera hog (she can also be seen in a previous photo from this month, examining my OU text books). I'm hoping I can repeat the success with this photo and take some of my other girls, it might be easier to get some in this way because when we've got them out, they just want to be held and cuddled.

And so that's me for another week (photowise at least). I'm hoping to carry on getting caught up on the reviews of the books I've been reading so far this year (just started book number 16 of the year this morning, so I'm no so far behind).

Project 365+1 Days 36 - 42

Earlier today I tried to get all of this week's photos uploaded to Flickr, but for some reason it wouldn't let me log in so I'll have to have a mass uploading session later in the week.

I quite like using my Project 365+1 photos to summarise my week, so I decided to make a collage of all of the January pictures. Hopefully I can do something similar for each month so I've got all of the pictures in twelve little groups.

My month in pictures

And onto the photos from this week...

Sunday I found myself craving chocolate. So when Mr. Click went out on an errand, I hinted that some chocolate might be a welcome treat. 'Hint' is maybe a little bit too subtle, I probably said something more along the lines of "I've been craving chocolate all week and I really, REALLY, think you should buy some before you think of coming home" but you know, whatever.

Either way, my hinting clearly worked:

Day 36: Double Chocolate

I should probably add here that they weren't both for me, and I do still have a significant lump of mine left because I'm not that much of a piggy.

Monday evening was largely spent ploughing on with the OU work I needed to be doing for my assignment. After noticing the colour-coding system going on with my course books I decided that I should also select my reading material to suit as well, okay, maybe it was just the next book on my obsessive-compulsively organised bookshelf. Whatever the reason, I started on The Perfect Storm, a book I'd been planning to read for several years.

Day 37: Odd One Out

So I snapped a picture of my rather impressive stack of books. I have to say that the green one in the middle (beneath the DVD case) is actually pretty good for a set course text. I've spent this week reading it in my lunch breaks at work and underlining copious amounts of it in pencil to reference in my assignment. Much better than the set text assigned for the first half of this course.

Another of my Day Zero Projects has been to buy some wool with the intention of actually making something with it (rather than spending an obscene amount on a 'good deal' and then stuffing it in a box because there's not enough of it to make anything worth making). In order to complete this task I thought I had better clear out some of the wool that I've had sitting in the spare bedroom in a big old double duvet box.

This thing was massive, about 2ft by 1ft and I was convinced that it was only about half-full with wool, surely the rest of the space in there was taken up by random junk, I could never have accumulated that much wool. Turns out, I had.

Day 38: A Big Tangle

And this is just a fraction of it! My new plan is to get knitting and use some of it up. I'm also ripping out a bunch of random things that I've started and lost the patterns for. Anything which looks too useless may get bundled up and eBayed or something. My weekend plans for a future weekend are going to include weighing and measuring just how much I've got before sorting it all into boxes and bags for easier storage. Fun!

As I said, a large portion of this week has been spent studying in one form or another. It's not always been easy, especially when your pets decide to help:

Day 39: Hitting The Books

This is Bell, deeply engrossed in my set book which I had been making notes on shortly before she decided to help. Holly and Ivy both enjoy 'helping' me keep track of my pens, while Carol likes to nibble the edges of the pages to show how far I've gotten through the book. (Who needs bookmarks when you've got rats?) On a related note, the girls are getting much better at being photographed, Ivy is a bit nervous of the flash (and they all get a bit jumpy at the sound of my DSLR) but this makes me happy because they're all so cute, I'm hoping I can get some nice photos of them all soon.

It was one of those weeks where at times I was reaching for something to photograph for 365+1. Mainly because most of my time this week has been spent working on my OU stuff. We get home in the evening, I pull out the books, we get the girls out and watch Spooks. Not really very many options for photos.

Day 40: Book and Brooch

But I'm still trying to find something that actually relates to the day in one way or another. For example, Day 40 is a photo of the book that Mr. Click got and was about to start reading that night (which he did virtually as soon as I finished using it for my photo). Perched on top of it is a little brooch that a friend gave me earlier that day. I used to collect all sorts of butterfly jewellery (most of which I still have but no longer wear), I'm thinking this one will look nice on my denim jacket which I normally wear through the summer months.

Day 41: A Blank Page

I finally made a start on actually writing my assignment out, beyond the ever-so-helpful notes. In preparation for it, I put off the actually writing of the first draft for as long as I could, I spent the whole evening stalling - rereading bits of the course books, making extra notes, taking an hour long super hot bath and then taking photos of all my stuff ready to go. Once I actually started it, it was relatively painless and by the time I gave it up for the night I was only 600 words away from the end.

I'm still yet to type it out, edit it and come up with a fitting conclusion, as well as changing my placeholder references such as "[Someone] says blah blah blah [ref p.31]" which makes sense in my notes but isn't particularly academic in its general formation. I'm ever-so-slightly paranoid that one day I'm going to forget to correct these bits and will submit the wrong version of the assignment.

And yesterday was just lovely. Up and out the house for a Red Cross meeting, we picked up pizza for lunch as a little treat and then headed home for a film and to fill up. Then a bit of OU work (the final 600 words of the aforementioned assignment). By the evening we'd watched another film and spent an age with the girls running around the sofa with us. We were craving a bit of hot chocolate but hadn't bothered picking any milk up while were were out earlier in the day, so Mr. Click improvised with a wartime equivalent made with the powdered milk we use for breadmaking. It wasn't bad at all.

Day 42: Wartime Hot Chocolate

This week is set to be fun. There's a day off work and a shopping trip tomorrow, I'm quite looking forward to that, even if I have had to go for a hospital appointment as well. I'm on one of my favourite shifts at work and I'm getting my assignment finished for submission on Thursday (so expect some more OU snaps during the coming Project 365+1 bunch). I also have coursework to do for the course I'm doing at work, thankfully there's not a lot left to be done so I'll get that done once I've finished my OU stuff.

And my father-in-law is off for his knee replacement surgery at the weekend as well. So it's going to be a busy week all round.